The Killer Inside Her

Don't let the innocent look fool you. Shalane Flanagan is an assassin in compression socks with an Olympic Marathon in her sights.

[Editor's Note: Since this story appeared in April 2011, Flanagan earned a spot on the U.S. Olympic Marathon team by winning the marathon trials in January. She is expected to run the 10,000 meters at the track trials in Eugene.]

This past November, a 29-year-old American named Shalane Flanagan found herself leading the ING New York City Marathon with three miles to go. At 110th Street, where Fifth Avenue kisses the corner of Central Park, she ran elbow-to-elbow with Edna Kiplagat and Mary Keitany, two of the best distance athletes in the world. Kiplagat had won the Los Angeles Marathon earlier in the year; Keitany was the reigning half-marathon world champion. Flanagan was no slouch, either: A 10,000-meter specialist, she already had an Olympic bronze medal in her pocket. It was the first NYC Marathon for all three athletes, and the first marathon of any kind for Keitany and Flanagan. Debut stages don't get any bigger.

Spectators shouted her name. "Go Shalane!" They wondered if they were witnessing history. No American woman had broken the tape in New York since Miki Gorman in 1977. With blonde hair and a face like Ireland itself, wearing knee-high compression socks and a red racing tank under a white-and-blue bib, Flanagan ran like a character cooked up in a comic book: Runner Woman. Cowbells clanged. Police sirens whoop-whooped. But inside Shalane Flanagan's head, all was calm.

Don't show your cards yet, she thought. Stay close. She matched Kiplagat and Keitany stride for stride. The advice of her coach, Jerry Schumacher, floated through her mind: Keep your cool. If you can keep your shit together, you have an opportunity here.

Years earlier her father, a former top marathoner himself, had spoken of the competition she might face one day. "You know where the best runners in the world are?" he said after she won a high-school race in her hometown of Marblehead, Massachusetts. "East Africa. When you can run against those women, then you've arrived."

And here she was, battling East Africa's best for the laurel crown.

The course doglegged into Central Park just before mile 24, where a series of rises add a little pepper to the race. Patience, Flanagan thought. That was the game plan she and Schumacher had agreed on. Conserve energy. The early miles were so slow that she and New Zealand runner Kim Smith shared a laugh over the 6:30 pace. Flanagan had to tamp down the urge to take off, unleash the beast, and demolish the field. Since high school, the fierce competitor within her struggled with her tactical brain. Kamikaze racing, she called it. No patience. Foolish. Years ago it had ended in yard sales. She'd collapsed within sight of the finish, again and again. Patience now.

The game plan worked. She'd gained confidence with every mile and now, in Central Park, she felt strong even on the uphills.

Then, surprise. Just past mile 25, Kiplagat broke away on a downhill. Keitany followed, but Flanagan's quads were shot. She pushed, but her body responded only with pain. I'm in third, Flanagan thought. Keep it close. Don't give up. Things can happen.

Things happened. Kiplagat kept pushing. Keitany faded. Flanagan, grinding on the uphills, reeled her in at Columbus Circle and reclaimed second. When Flanagan turned off Central Park South for the last stretch, Kiplagat was 20 seconds ahead. Flanagan was still hurting. If Kiplagat collapsed, Flanagan would have a shot. If not, she thought, that's okay. This is what I have today.

Kiplagat stayed strong and snapped the tape in 2:28:20. Flanagan crossed 20 seconds later. Second place—but a triumph nonetheless. As Flanagan congratulated Kiplagat, third-place finisher Keitany draped the Stars and Stripes over Flanagan's shoulders. The PA system blared The Guess Who classic, "American Woman." Flanagan raised the flag for the roaring crowd: This American woman had arrived.

The little girl who grew up idolizing Suzy Favor Hamilton and Joan Benoit Samuelson is becoming a heroine herself. Over the past decade she's deliberately worked through the distances—1500 meters to 3000 to 5000 to 10-K, and now the marathon. By combining a burning passion for running with a will capable of cold execution, she's put herself on the brink of mainstream stardom. Flanagan has the potential to become the Lindsey Vonn or Mia Hamm of running. All she's got to do is—and this is her plan—win on the biggest stages in the world.

AS A CHILD GROWING UP in Boulder, Colorado, Shalane Flanagan thought all grown-ups woke up in the morning and went running. After all, her parents did. Her mother, Cheryl Bridges (now Cheryl Treworgy), held the women's marathon world record, 2:49:40, from 1971 to 1973. Her father, Steve Flanagan, was a 2:18 marathoner who laid down 90 miles a week. Boulder's hothouse running culture was little Shalane's nursery. Olympian Frank Shorter, CU coach Jerry Quiller, mountain master Rick Trujillo—they were just Mom and Dad's friends. When her parents ran into the hills, Shalane yearned to join them.

When her folks divorced in 1986, Shalane (then 5) and her younger sister Maggie moved to Marblehead, Massachusetts, with their father. The relocation didn't diminish her desire to run. Her dad, though, was wary of her taking up the family trade.

"He wanted me to find it on my own, make sure I was really passionate about it," she recalls. Flanagan didn't run competitively until high school. "It was like my parents were dangling this candy in front of me, like, yes, maybe you could run someday?"

Instead, she honed her competitive instincts on the soccer pitch. "Even as a young girl, her energy level and recovery were incredible," says Steve Flanagan, now 62. "And she could take a shot, deliver a shot, catch a ball in the gut, and get right back in the game. There are a lot of track athletes who don't get that. She can go places mentally that some of her competition can't."

Flanagan's competitive fire burns so hot it sometimes leads to meltdown. Her junior year in high school, she collapsed short of the finish line in a race that would have qualified her for the Foot Locker Cross-Country Nationals. The next year she arrived at the Foot Locker regionals at Van Cortlandt Park with something to prove. After setting a blistering pace, she again blew up within sight of the tape. It wasn't all wreckage, of course. Her national indoor mile title and state record two-mile performance earned her a number of scholarship offers. She turned down Villanova's storied running program to create her own tradition at the University of North Carolina. Confidence was not her weak suit. While just a freshman working with then-UNC distance coach Michael Whittlesey, now at the University of Kansas, Flanagan devised a plan to redshirt her senior spring season to train for the 2004 Olympic Trials.
"It was kind of cocky," she says, laughing at her younger self. "I mean, I had mediocre times. I was just one of a bunch of kids with potential."

It was no joke to Whittlesey, though.

"We were dead serious about it," he recalls. "Her first semester, we saw the talent she had. We realized she needed a four-year program: two years to improve her speed, then transition to a longer distance, toward the 5-K."

She still had a lot to learn. As a sophomore in 2001, Flanagan was a heavy favorite going into the NCAA Cross-Country Championships. Again she bolted out fast. "I wanted to demolish the field," she recalls. "I wanted the race decided before it had begun." With 1200 meters to go, she threw down the hammer and dropped the field. "I wanted to finish every race without any gas in the tank," she says. Disaster. She burned out short of the line and finished 22nd.

"It was one of the best things that ever happened to Shalane," says Whittlesey. "It brought home the importance of patience, and being confident you'll have speed when you need it late in the race."

The next year a chastened Flanagan stuck to her coach's game plan, harnessed the kamikaze within, and won the race. A year later she repeated.

WATCHING SHALANE Flanagan train on a grassy field at Nike's Beaverton, Oregon, headquarters is like watching Ichiro Suzuki take batting practice, or watching Ray Allen drill three-pointers in an empty gym. See the master at work, turning the spectacular into the familiar through endless repetition. On a recent damp and cold Thursday morning, Flanagan joined training partner Lisa Koll and Schumacher for what the coach called a "brick-laying session": putting down one more piece of the foundation.

"We'll do a long aerobic workout, short recovery today," Schumacher told the runners. "The goal is to do eight to 12 miles, starting in the 5:30s, progressing to the 5:20s," he said, speaking of their mile times. "Definitely nothing faster—there will be no 5:13s today." Schumacher grinned.

The runners took off, with Flanagan leading the first interval. A 23-year-old fair-haired corn-belt phenom, Koll joined Schumacher's Nike squad last September after a record-setting career at Iowa State and a second-place finish in the 10,000 at last year's USA Outdoor Track & Field Championships. It can get lonely for a woman on Nike's teams, and Flanagan has been thrilled to have Koll around to push her and to share the load of training miles. "I am WICKED excited to announce that we have a new member joining our group," she tweeted when Koll joined the team. "I have another ponytail to run with!"

Koll is compact, tough, wiry, and fast—but, though it hardly seems possible, Flanagan seems smaller, thinner, faster, and smoother. The ponytails reveal the difference. As the two women laid down tightly controlled quarter-mile splits—"Eighty-one point eight, perfect!" Schumacher shouted—Koll's ponytail bounced from side to side. Flanagan's did not move. Koll worked hard. Flanagan cruised, her knees and elbows like oiled hinges. She's one of the prettiest, most efficient runners in the world, with no wasted motion. She moves like an assassin. Whittlesey, her college coach, says he recruited her because of those amazing mechanics: "She kind of floats," he says.
The women swapped leads as the miles piled up. Schumacher's regimen is unforgiving: Two miles at 5:20, 90 seconds to recover, then another two miles.

The men on Schumacher's Nike squad, who would train after the women, filtered onto the infield to warm up. It's an intimidating audience of distance all-stars: American two-mile record holder Matt Tegenkamp; Canadian 10,000-meter champion Simon Bairu; Chris Solinsky, America's first sub-27-minute 10-K runner; Tim Nelson, who came within one second of beating Meb Keflezighi at the '09 USA Cross-Country Championships. "Way to go, ladies!" they said as Flanagan and Koll ran past.

At mile seven, Koll began to break down. On this day, her body couldn't keep up the 80-second splits Flanagan stacked like cordwood. A gap opened up. "C'mon, Lisa! Keep working!" the guys called out.

Simon Bairu watched as Koll struggled. "I see myself in Lisa right now," he said. The other guys nodded as if to say, We've all had those days.

At mile eight, Schumacher shut Koll down. "I know you can do more, but it wouldn't be prudent today," he explained. Meanwhile, Flanagan continued to record 80-second splits. "I want the last 400 meters to be just the same," Schumacher told her.

"Nothing faster." Control. Control. Control. Keep the kamikaze in check. Her last split is 79 seconds. One second faster than Jerry wanted—just a taste of that delicious speed.

IT'S A DELICATE BALANCE they're trying to achieve, runner and coach: Harness Flanagan's hell-for-leather, blow-out-the-field urges without snuffing her fiery spirit. Because that competitiveness has gotten her here. And sometimes the gamble pays off.

Take the 2004 Olympic Trials, for instance. Just out of college—her red-shirted senior year—she lined up against the nation's best mid-distance runners in the 5000. "There's no way I should have made that team," Flanagan says. "I just willed myself onto it." She did it by placing a risky bet. Flanagan took off fast, setting a hot pace that she hoped would break the will of her competitors. "I led most of the way, until Shayne Culpepper and Marla Runyan just blasted me in the last 300 meters," she says. She held on for third, enough to earn her plane ticket to Athens. It's one of her favorite races, in part because she dictated the terms. "I took control of my destiny."

Athens turned out to be a bust. Flanagan had peaked at the Trials and arrived at the Games naive and unprepared. "I felt like I'd gone straight from the ACC Championships to the Olympic stadium," she says. "It was a big shock to the system." She came in 11th in the 5000-meter semifinal and made a quiet exit. She vowed that next time she would compete, not just participate.

In her first-ever 10-K, Flanagan put the world on notice by smashing the U.S. record by 17 seconds.

To do that, though, she first had to cut a bone out of her foot.

Talk about a medical anomaly: For the first 24 years of her life, one of America's most gifted runners ran with an extra bone in her left foot. The size of a fingernail, it was embedded in her posterior tibial tendon. "I'd get a sharp jabbing pain every time I toed off," she says. She and her husband, Steve Edwards, a former UNC runner who's now her manager, shopped the injury all over the country. "We saw close to 10 doctors, homeopaths, physical therapists—nobody could figure it out," Edwards says. Finally an orthopedic surgeon spotted the extra bone in an x-ray. One surgery and a year of rehab later, she finally ran pain-free.

With one eye on the 2008 Olympics, Flanagan paired up with former George Mason University coach John Cook, who was also working with rising middle-distance stars Shannon Rowbury and Erin Donohue. Flanagan thrived under Cook. She broke the U.S. 5000-meter record and lowered the indoor American 3000-meter standard by six seconds. In the spring of 2008, she put the world on notice by smashing the American record in the 10,000 meters by 17 seconds—in her first-ever 10-K.

Four years after Athens, Flanagan arrived in China primed to podium. After spending a few days getting acclimated at USA Track & Field's training camp in Dalian, China, Flanagan came down with food poisoning the night before she was scheduled to fly to Beijing. "Initially, I freaked out," Flanagan says. "All your dreams are riding on this one moment, and disaster strikes."

As it happened, that all-night puke session turned out to be a catharsis. "The next day, I thought: This is out of my control. I felt the weight of expectations lifted off my shoulders. By the time I made it to the starting line, I felt great to just be there. I was open to any possibility—from medaling to not even finishing."

She toed the line with Ethiopians Elvan Abeylegesse (running for Turkey) and Tirunesh Dibaba, who had broken the 5000-meter world record two months earlier. Dutch half-marathon world record holder Lornah Kiplagat (no relation to Edna Kiplagat) was there, as were fellow Americans Kara Goucher and Amy Yoder Begley. On race day a rumor circulated that Kiplagat planned to go out fast. Flanagan was familiar with the strategy.

She says she chose New York "to face the best right off the bat. I had to know, Do I have what it takes?"

"When Lornah went out at the gun, I thought, This isn't a fake move; this is for real," Flanagan says. "So I latched on and hung on for dear life." In a race described by the BBC as "brutally quick," Flanagan stayed with the leaders and concentrated on picking off competitors one by one. "It was like a NASCAR race. There were so many women on the track, and toward the end we were lapping people. I was so focused on eating up people I couldn't tell who was ahead of me and who was being lapped."
Goucher and Yoder Begley lagged behind; Kiplagat faded. With two laps to go, Flanagan overtook Kenya's Linet Masai. "I thought she was in third," Flanagan says, "but I reminded myself not to let the moment get the better of me." With Dibaba and Abeylegesse nearly 30 seconds ahead of her, Flanagan focused on the bronze. "I ran an aggressive yet conservative last 800 meters. If Linet came back at me, I'd have one more gear to go to."

She didn't need it. The battle for gold produced a transcendent kick from Tirunesh Dibaba, who won by covering the final hundred meters in 14 seconds, faster than any woman in the 1500 final. Flanagan cruised calmly home to claim the bronze medal.

FAIR OR NOT, America rewards its runners with glory only when they perform spectacularly on the biggest stages. Plenty of great athletes are legends within track and road running, but few are household names. Those who break through—Joan Benoit Samuelson, Frank Shorter, Carl Lewis, Florence Griffith Joyner, Bill Rodgers, Alberto Salazar—do so by virtue of their work in Boston, New York, or the Olympic Games. Many are marathoners. There's something simultaneously heroic and familiar about the distance: Not many recreational runners own a 5000-meter PR, but more than a half-million know their marathon time.

"There's something special about the marathon," Flanagan has said. Watching her parents run them in the 1980s, seeing the exultation and wreckage at the finish, enjoying the festival atmosphere—it set the race in her mind as the ultimate goal. "I grew up believing that once you completed a marathon, it was as if you had been sworn into a secret society," she once wrote.

"Shalane's always had a long-term vision, and I think she knew she'd be a marathoner some day," says Erin Donohue, Flanagan's friend and former UNC teammate.

That day arrived in 2009. She left mid-distance coach Cook, scouting for someone who could transform her into a long-distance champion. She got on the phone with Jerry Schumacher, the former University of Wisconsin coach hired away by Nike and Alberto Salazar. "I wanted a coach for the rest of my career, so I had to be sure it was the right fit," Flanagan says.

Those conversations sealed the deal. Schumacher is now 40, but he exudes the infectious enthusiasm and energy of a 28-year-old track geek. Flanagan would hang up the phone so excited about running that she couldn't sleep at night. "I had to have a curfew—I couldn't talk to Jerry past eight at night," she says.

Cook took the split hard, lashing out to a Washington Times reporter, "We brought her from boot to bronze," accusing Flanagan and her husband of stealing his methods. "It wasn't an easy decision, and John took it hard," Flanagan says. "I'm grateful for his years of coaching, but I felt our relationship had run its course. I needed to change things to become a better athlete."
Flanagan relocated to Portland to train with Schumacher full-time on the Nike campus. Her new coach dramatically increased her workload, and her body responded. To prepare for the New York City Marathon, she and Steve spent last summer in Mammoth Lakes, California, the high-altitude training ground of elite American marathoners such as Deena Kastor and Meb Keflezighi. There, they shared a small rental condo with Simon Bairu and Tim Nelson. (Nike sponsorship is sweet, but it ain't hedge-fund money.) "We were running 120 miles a week, at altitude, and increasing our speed," says Bairu. "When Nelly and I would go out, Shalane would start with us and hold on until she blew up. She's just a tough, tough girl."

Few knew just how tough until the morning of November 7, 2010. Flanagan could have tested her readiness in a smaller marathon, somewhere away from the media spotlight. That she chose not to says a lot about her ambition. "I wanted to face the best competition right off the bat," she says. "I needed to know: Is this something I really want to invest in? Do I have what it takes?"

She had it in spades. In the run-up to the New York City Marathon, Flanagan posted a blog that revealed the passion she brought to the race. "The hardest training I have ever encountered will be met with the most challenging race of my life," she wrote. "For two and a half hours my heart will be displayed on the streets of NYC."

NYC loved the display.

For the coming year, Flanagan and Schumacher have charted a course that keeps her out of any marathons. "It would be dangerous for me to run another one this year," she told me. I didn't quite understand what she meant. "I found it to be kind of addictive," she explained. "And the training required—it's arduous. You're in a lot of pain and a constant state of fatigue."

At the same time, that marathon training created a stronger core. "The stress I put my body through last fall, training for New York, elevated my fitness," she says. "I'm now able to run 110 to 115 miles a week and recover much quicker. My body's adapted."

So this year she'll get reacquainted with speed, maybe run a few 5000-or 10,000-meter track races in the spring, and possibly take a shot at the 10,000 at the IAAF World Championships in Daegu, South Korea. After that it's all aimed at the marathon in the 2012 London Games, where she'll face a level of American competition and anticipation not seen in a generation—Deena Kastor and Kara Goucher are also gunning for the Olympic Marathon.

She's not chasing fame, but Flanagan is keenly focused on the path to mainstream recognition. "Promotion isn't necessarily my thing, but I am striving to inspire people, just like Suzy [Favor Hamilton] and Lynn Jennings inspired me."

To do that, "I want to have my best performances on big stages," she says. "And the next really big stage is the Olympic Trials, and then London after that."

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